The Collected Letters, Volume 27

I have had a cold these 3 days, which has grown frightfully worse last night, and has at present flung me quite on my beam-ends.

I send the Chorley Mss.,1 tho' very doubtful whether you will find anything in it worth the trouble of looking. Item, 3 out of 5 or 6 rubbish-bundles; a still more questionable-looking adventure. These bundles, both the 3 now sent and all
the rest, have each a certain labelling on them; but, alas, it now suggests no definite idea even to myself;—in fact, oblivion covers the whole matter to me, and
I know not almost at all how to make a choice for you. I can only say, if you like to come here, the whole Box shall be joyfully
laid open to you, and you may follow your own luck in the matter.

Oh for better times— Oh for a little west wind at any rate! Poor old Cochrane, I am heartily sad about him.

1. John Chorley had taken the drafts about Cromwell and his times that TC had not used for Cromwell, recopied them, and returned both to TC in March 1851; see TC to MAC, 1 Jan. 1851. The whereabouts of Chorley's transcript is not known; TC's original drafts are Strouse MSS. It may be that, at this time,
Forster sorted out his own collection of TC's drafts for Cromwell, the Forster MSS, now FC: MSS, long unknown because miscatalogued;
see K. J. Fielding, “Carlyle and Cromwell: The Writing of History and ‘DRYASDUST,’” Strouse Carlyle Lectures, ed. J. J. James and R. Bottoms (Santa Cruz, Calif., 1985), 44–67.